How Thou Canst Maketh a Fine Program in Fortran

Re:How Thou Canst Maketh a Fine Program in Fortran by azag0 on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @01:30PM (#14499119)

Personal experience: My general language-to-go is Python, and I'm very fond of Rust. But Fortran has no competition in numerical computing at native speeds in terms of convenience. I was just recently rewriting a small Fortran library (that I usually but not always call from Python) to C, and it was a pain. So, as a result of that, Fortran is still used heavily in scientific computing. (On the other hand, Fortran is a pain for anything else than numbers and arrays.)

It is also the only language I'm aware of that has a special syntax for distributed memory [1], making parallel distributed computing potentially extremely convenient.

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Coarray

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Re:How Thou Canst Maketh a Fine Program in Fortran by nickpsecurity on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @04:48PM (#14501194)

What do you think about Julia language? It's a modern take on a language for number crunching that has support for C and Python code. Also uses some Fortran libraries that are optimized.

https://julialang.org

Far as distributed, see Cray's Chapel and Taft's Parasail for languages trying to improve on that. Chapel's competition was IBM X10 and Fortress languages. Im not sure if those two are maintained any more, though.

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